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136 
BIRD'S EYE VIEW
Page 39
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BY THE HAWK
• Far be it from Commercial Motor to denigrate Britain's magnificent nineteenth century rail network (well it does try, doesn't it?) but still it fails. This carriage was spotted by the Hawk last week at a service station on the M1 as I journeyed north on a motorway choked to capacity with Wednesday-rail-strike traffic.
It brought that old British Rail advertising slogan to mind, "We're getting there." By road, it seems.
• Oxford University is sitting comfortably with Fiat's donation of 2700,000 to finance its Italian studies professorship: the Fiat Serena chair.
• Motorists on the M6 northbound were lucky to escape with their usual headache while sitting in Friday evening's rush hour, instead of a severe bump from a 19-tonne anvil which fell off a lorry near Birmingham, causing a 201m-plus tailback. • Drivers found themselves in rather a sticky situation at the weekend on the A470 in Wales after it had just been tarred by Gwynedd County Council. It rained (well it would, wouldn't it?) and the tar turned into a glutinous morass. The council now faces claims from irate motorists over alleged damage to their tyres.
• There's now no need to fight your way through traffic to reach the great outdoors, thanks to Operation Innervator's mobile rockface.
The coach, which can be transformed within minutes into a climbing and canoeing centre (well that's the claim!) will be visiting Newcastle, Stockton and Middlesbrough.
• Is nothing sacred? Just when you thought you'd had enough of buzzwords and newspeak, certain powershifted truck salesmen and marketing types have decided that the trucks they sell have a "mission".
"We don't see our truck doing that . ." they say, "its mission is high-speed trunking/ low-speed crawling/second-lane dawdling/inner-city muckawaying/long-haul sleeping/inter-urban distributing (pick one from column A and one from column B).
Whatever happened to the good old fashioned "right tool for the right job" sort of description?
As Winston Churchill said: "This is the sort of english up with which I shall not put."
• As the popularity of truck racing grows (the pundits reckon it is now the second biggest motor sport crowd puller after Formula One), so does the number of circuits willing to play host to the heavy stuff.
Lydden racetrack near Dover in Kent is the latest bidder, having successfully run its first truck race on 11 June.
The circuit, which is famous for its on and off-road rallycross events, wisely kept the trucks on the tarmac as Divina Galica won the day.
Lydden hosts its next truck racing on the weekend of 19-20 August.